The Silver Lining of More Cancer Deaths

A National Post graphic does a good job showing causes of death across Canada by percentage, and notes that, for the first time, cancer is the leading cause in every province, responsible for about 30 percent of all deaths. That is a heartbreaking number, not least because cancer is a disease (or set of diseases, really) about which so much is still unknown.

(Jonathon Rivait/National Post)

As we wrote in a section of SuperFreakonomics called “We’re still getting our butts kicked by cancer,” seeing cancer statistics like this might naturally lead one to conclude that the “war on cancer” has been a dismal failure. That, however, would be an overstatement. While it’s true that we are, as one oncologist told us, “still getting our butts kicked,” there is somewhat of a silver lining in the cancer death rate. From SuperFreak:

The age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is essentially unchanged over the past half-century, at about 200 deaths per 100,000 people. This is despite President Nixon’s declaration of a “war on cancer” more than thirty years ago, which led to a dramatic increase in funding and public awareness.

Believe it or not, this flat mortality rate actually hides some good news. Over the same period, age-adjusted mortality from cardiovascular disease has plummeted, from nearly 600 people per 100,000 to well beneath 300.* What does this mean?

Many people who in previous generations would have died from heart disease are now living long enough to die from cancer instead.

Indeed, nearly 90 percent of newly diagnosed lung-cancer victims are fifty-five or older; the median age is seventy-one. The flat cancer death rate obscures another hopeful trend. For people twenty and younger, mortality has fallen by more than 50 percent, while people aged twenty to forty have seen a decline of 20 percent. These gains are real and heartening — all the more so because the incidence of cancer among those age groups has been increasing. (The reasons for this increase aren’t yet clear, but among the suspects are diet, behaviors, and environmental factors.)

Actually, the National Post graphic does a horrible job of showing causes of death in Canada. First of all, it’s an area graph. Human perceptual systems aren’t very good at discerning differences in areas. They’re much better at discerning differences in lengths. Even if we could distinguish differences in areas very well, it’s not clear which ones to compare. The graphic shows a whole hierarchy of causes, and not all of the terminal nodes are on the same level. The only information we can really get from that graphic are the numbers given, which would have been easier to read in a table.

It looks nice, but the intersection of graphics that look nice and graphics that adequately convey information is actually pretty small.

im optimistic- with genetic screening for cancer risk as well as decreasing environmental pollution, i predict we will decrease cancer rates so that we can all get older and croak from a heart attck like the good old days

How can we be sure that “the incidence of cancer among those age groups (people aged twenty to forty) has been increasing”? Or we just know that more cancer incidents are diagnosed and reported now than before? I guess that cancer diagnostics techniques and the reporting system to national heath authorities have been improved a lot in the last decades.

As a Canadian I’m shocked and dismayed at the deaths from accidental Gund discharge. I wasn’t aware that stuffed bears were even capable of such carnage. 11 deaths! I guess the intentional Gund discharge is aggregated into the 31 clubbed to death.

That so-called “documentary” is basically an uncritical public relations piece, produced by the clinic itself, because so many people believe whatever shows up on their TV screens, especially if you label it “documentary” instead of “advertisement”. The director’s career is almost all advertising.

What you need to know is this: In the end, Burzynski’s patients DIE. They are always worse off financially than conventionally treated patients, and some of them die when traditional treatments might have saved them (or at least prolonged their lives). The only benefit they get is false hope.

Humans are wired this way: if I spend all my money to make a pilgrimage to a holy place, then God is obligated to cure me. The modern world’s “holy place” is no longer a shrine or a temple, but a medical clinic. For people who understand science, the pilgrimage is made to the Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, Scripps, or other big names in cancer research. For people who don’t, it’s Burzynski’s clinic, a Gerson practitioner, or the Hoxsey clinics down in Mexico.

The graphic above shows deaths, but it does not weight them by the age of the person who died.

It’s incredibly important to incorporate age into “biggest killers” statistics, especially when using them to prioritize research or treatment, because for many people cancer is the mechanism of “dying of old age.”

Secondly, our return on investment for a cancer cure has been extremely low so far, but there has been promising research on behavioral and environmental factors that we can control to drastically reduce the instance of and death from cancer, especially premature deaths. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” or 6 months of chemotherapy is more expensive than preventing dozens of new cases of cancer.